An article from Do or Die Issue 48-49.
In the
paper edition, this article appears on page(s)
5.

DuPont's Plans in Goa Go Up in Smoke

by Claude Alvares,
Third World Network

In the space of a mere weekend, after a series of fast-moving developments,
DuPont's proposal to set up Asia's largest Nylon 6.6 plant in Goa, (India) has
been literally burnt to cinders.

For seven years now, the villages surrounding the proposed site have carried
on a sustained agitation on environmental and other grounds against the project.
But the final denouement commenced in late January after police swooped down on
eight demonstrators and stripped and beat them up in the police cells.

The incident of police brutality had repercussions the police and the
administration could never have imagined. It led to a large-scale demonstration
during a public function organised by Eduardo Falheiro, the Union Minister of
State for Chemicals, at Farmagudi, Ponda, on 21 January 1995. Events snowballed
rapidly after that, leading to the movement taking over the plant site on 25
January.

On the evening of 22 January village girls saw a truck moving to the site of
the proposed factory; they realised that the company would be up to some
activity the next day.

The Americans had apparently met Chief Minister Pratap Singh Range and
insisted they be allowed to visit the proposed site and to begin preliminary
work, with police protection if necessary. They therefore decided to move in to
the site in an air-conditioned bus, escorted by two police vans. The trip was a
serious act of provocation since the area was already quite tense with the
happenings of the days earlier.

At Arla, one kilometre from the site, a large crowd women were already
squatting in the middle of the narrow single road that leads to the site. They
refused to budge. The Americans had to return to Ponda. They were furious. They
met the Chief Minister again and demanded more aggressive action against the
protesters. At 2pm, a CID inspector visited the Arla blockade site, told the
women and other activists to disperse and threatened them with dire
consequences. He was driven away.

At around 4.30 pm, three jeep loads of officials accompanied by two bus loads
of police returned to the site. After they had parked their vehicles in a line
along the road, the police got out and sprayed bullets directly at the
women.

No warning was given. Two girls fell, with bullet injuries on their thighs.
Then a young man, Nilesh Naik, also fell to the first line of bullets.
Eyewitnesses say he was shot in the chest at point-blank range.

The women, despite being shot at, moved with determination towards the
policemen firing at them who now panicked as stones began flying at them from
both sides of the road. The officials jammed themselves into a police bus,
turned around and fled. The other bus faced the fury of the crowd and so did the
three jeeps.

They were burned to ashes. Several policemen suffered injuries. Some were
kidnapped by the crowd and stripped of their clothes in a return action for what
had been done to their fellow activists earlier.

A passing bus was requisitioned by the activists to rush Nilesh to the Ponda
Hospital. However, the police impounded the bus two kilometres down the road,
broke up the vehicle in anger and took Nilesh with them to the Ponda police
station where he lay for another 20 minutes before he was taken on a motorcycle
to the hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival; the doctor said the young
man would have survived had he arrived just a few minutes earlier. The other
injured people were shifted to the Bambolim Medical College near Panjim.

The villagers next targeted the public clinic set up by DuPont for the
villagers at Querim and razed it to the ground.

By this time anger against DuPont and Thapar had reached a crescendo. The
night of the police murder, the Anti-Nylon Coordinating Committee announced a
Ponda strike for the following day even as the administration imposed a curfew
on the city.

The following day, however, before dawn could break, roadblocks were already
installed by the activists bringing all life to a grinding halt. Police
officials attempting to approach the town were met by a rain of soda water
bottles at Kundai and had to retreat to Panjim. Several buses and jeeps went up
in flames. No human beings, however, were hurt.

In the morning, after they had taken control of Ponda town, the activists
went up to the local Thapar DuPont office and brought out more than 700 files,
piles of site plans and drawings of the proposed factory, visiting cards, fax
machines and office equipment including tables, a refrigerator, three pistols
and an illegal Sten gun and burned these in the middle of the road. Twelve
suitcases stacked with 500 denomination rupee notes belonging to the company
were also consigned to the flames.

In the evening, a fire engine which came into the city unescorted was also
burned to junk. Throughout the day, the curfew was imposed on the police by the
people, rather than the other way around. They had now to remain within the
precincts of the Ponda and Farmagudi police stations for fear of being
exterminated if they ventured out. The strike ended at 8 pm.

On 25 January, the body of Nilesh was brought to the Ponda bus stand from the
morgue where it was dressed with flowers by hundreds of activists and taken in a
kilometre long procession to the village of Savoi Verem. The procession took
over two hours as villagers all along the 12 kilometre route, including hundreds
of school children, insisted on paying their respects to the fallen activist. In
the evening, the body was cremated on a specially erected platform just outside
the factory's gates. The area was re-named Hutatma Nilesh Pathar (plateau).

Even as the funeral pyre was lit, smoke could be seen billowing from the
factory's administrative buildings as demonstrators set fire to them. A stick of
dynamite exploded among the remains of the administrative buildings.

Later the same evening, Thapar DuPont MD, Sam Singh, informed the press the
company "was completely shaken up over the past three days' events" and
expressed his disappointment that the Chief Minister could not provide safety
and security for the company's properties at the site.

As the people began returning home from the brightly burning pyre, it was
quite obvious that the site - acquired by the Government for the factory - had
returned into the possession of the villagers. Village animals including goats
and cows, prevented for several months from entering the area, were now seen
once again freely browsing all over the plot.

The week's events were an utter humiliation for DuPont, America's largest
chemical multinational. The militant and successful rejection of the
multinational's factory is the first of its kind since the country began the
process of neo-liberalisation, and it presages more to come as multinationals
attempt to grab more and more Indian resources through the agencies of the
Indian state in the name of progress.

For more info contact: Third World Network, 228 Macalister Road, 10400
Penang, Malaysia.